video of a pianist named Aaron Diehl
playing Fats Waller's "Viper's Drag"---
precise, soulful, and joyous all at once.
"It was exciting to see somebody play
Fats Waller with a fresh take yet very
much in the spirit of the music," she
said. "I'd been trying to do this for
years---take something old and make
it yours but still authentic---and here
was someone who'd figured it out." She
called him, and they met. "He was very
versatile, very serious, and didn't seem
to be an asshole," she recalled. "Those
were the boxes I checked o ."
Their first gig was at the Kennedy
Center. More gigs followed, with Sal-
vant fronting Diehl's trio (including
Paul Sikivie on bass and Lawrence
Leathers on drums), and the musicians
coalesced into a working band, on the
road three weeks out of every month.
She also recorded an album, called
"WomanChild," for Mack Avenue,
which received a Grammy nomination
for Best Jazz Vocal Album. (Her next
album, "For One to Love," won the
award.) Meanwhile, she flunked her
composition course at the New School
because she had an out-of-town gig on
exam day. She dropped out, no longer
needing the academic structure.
Before a recent tour in France, Sal-
vant stopped by Aaron Diehl's
apartment one afternoon to rehearse
some songs. The two live in the same
building, Salvant on the top floor and
Diehl on the parlor and ground floors.
"It's like the pros of having a room-
mate without the cons," she said.
Salvant wanted to try out a new
discovery, a song from the nineteen-
twenties called "Dites-Moi Que Je Suis
Belle" ("Tell Me I'm Pretty"), by a cab-
aret singer named Yvette Guilbert. She
played a YouTube clip of it on her
phone, and sang along in a quiet, crys-
talline voice. They spent half an hour
exploring ways to make it sound like
jazz. Diehl picked out the chords, then
tinkered with them, thickening the har-
mony; he added a pop-tune bass line,
then discarded it in favor of a vamp
that opened some space between cho-
ruses. Diehl is Juilliard-trained, aca-
demic in demeanor, attuned to the log-
ical structure of a song. But he deferred
to Salvant, partly because she's the
band's leader and partly because, he
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